Home»Tag: windows server
August 29, 2012 Austin Leach

Coming soon to a business near you - Windows Server 2012!

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Windows Server 2012 is scheduled to be released to manufacturers this and will be for sale to the public in September! Are you excited yet? Here are some reasons why we are.

Microsoft will be making a big push in the realm of virtualization, attempting to take a bigger slice of the pie from industry leader VMware. Among the many new features of Windows Server 2012, one that has a lot of people talking, is the increased performance of virtual machines. VMware can currently deliver 300,000 input/output operations (I/Os) per second from a single virtual machine, and Microsoft has stated that Windows Server 2012 will be able to deliver over 1,000,000 I/Os. To put that in perspective, imagine that your flight time from LA to Tokyo was reduced from 10 hours to 3.5? Think of all of things you could do with that extra time.

Another new feature promising big speed increases over what is currently available is called offloaded transfer (ODX). Using ODX, a 10GB demo file was moved into storage in approximately 10 seconds, and without a corresponding spike in network utilization. So instead of having to wait until after hours to download software updates or run backups, they can happen during the day without having anyone’s work interrupted.

These are just two of many new features that are coming with Windows Server 2012 and we will be keeping a close eye on it when it gets released. If you have questions about virtual servers or Windows Server products, call us at 888-244-1748 to talk to one of our network engineers.

November 25, 2011 Danny Sears 0

Domain Admins! Join a computer to your domain REMOTELY!

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Hey there domain administrators.  Did you know it was possible to join a computer to your domain remotely?  Not so hard at all.

First, you must have VPN configured on your network.  Your VPN can be configured directly to your firewall, or through your firewall to your Windows Server Routing and Remote Access.  (How to setup PPTP on a Windows Server)

Once you’ve configured your VPN, you are now ready to join computers to the domain remotely.

First, connect to the VPN, so that your computer receives a local IP address from your network.

Next, open your computer properties to join to domain as you normally would internally.  Attempt to join your computer to the domain.  It will prompt you for domain admin credentials if your route has worked, and woila!  your are now joined.  Reboot the computer.

If you don’t get the prompt for domain admin credentials, that most likely means you are not able to ping the domain controller via hostname, and you will need to manually edit your hosts file.

To do this:

  1. Goto:  C:\Windows\Syste32\drivers\etc
  2. Open your hosts file with Wordpad “Run as Administrator”.  You may need to open Wordpad as an administrator first, and then open the file
  3. Goto the bottom of your hosts file and enter the following:  ”IP Address”, Tab 2 X’s, “server name” - where the IP address is the IP of your Domain Controller, and the Server Name is the host name of your Domain Controller.
  4. Save the hosts file
Now try joining your computer to the domain again.  This should work for you.
Good luck!